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Excerpt: In previous posts I discussed Basic Research in Language Recognition, the Difficulty of Language Identification and How Search Engines Recognize the Language of Your Pages.This might be very interesting, but the point is that you WANT search engines to properly recognize the language in which your site is written. Why is this important? I also wrote a post about what will happen if your website language is not recognized. So we finally come to the core of the problem: How do we ensure that the search engines recognize the language of our original and localized pages? Because if your translation is…
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Excerpt: In the previous post (Language Identification is difficult) I highlighted how difficult it could be to identify a language. Yet Google does it somehow: it has over 160 domains, and Google allows restricting user results to pages in 117 languages, so “somehow” it must be able to “understand” into which languages these pages must be. Based on the literature and the hints found in places such as Google’s Webmaster Central, search engines seem to use a variety of methods to detect the language of your web pages. Meta-tag. Ok, Google ignores this, but other search engines (such as Yahoo!) will recognize the…
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Excerpt: I highlighted in the previous post (Basic Research in Language Recognition) some of the academic research that is taking place and that provides the groundwork for language recognition and identification by the search engines. But why is the recognition of the language in web pages so difficult? Machines don’t “understand” a language. Machines are stupid. Even so-called artificial intelligence is light-years away from the intelligence of a 5-year old. Any human being that knows how to read can immediately identify the languages he speaks, and often also others. But machines –and search engines are just that– need to be programmed to analyze…
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Excerpt: One of the advantages of being an IT professional as well as a translator is that as part of my IT duties I try to keep ahead of the wave and therefore keep an eye of state-of-the-art research. This, obviously, means having a subscription in professional societies such as the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) or the IEEE Computer Society, as well as reading the content of their digital libraries as well as their publications. I also keep an eye on the most relevant SEO blogs and forums and of course on the Google webmaster blog. So I stumbled on several…
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Excerpt: One interesting thing, which is almost never considered, is the fact that error pages very often will pop up in the original site language. Why? Because the webmaster never thought about it in the first place. Now, from the user experience point of view, this is not exactly thrilling. Imagine that you are navigating a localized French page, and you get a 404 error (Page not found) in English. The user might not understand English in the first place, and he might not even know what a 404 error is. Will he click the page back to where he was? Will…
